Imagine for a moment a billiards table. The balls in the center of the table are stacked in a pyramid, ready for the game to start. The first player hits the cue ball into the pyramid, and each and every ball scatters in wildly different directions around the entirety of the table. Now imagine that collision except in reverse. It seems impossible, right? That’s because we are looking at the billiards table and inherently incorporating the second law of thermodynamics — that an object will either remain static or descend towards a state of chaos — and the idea that the chaos could suddenly become order is simply laughable. However, this is no longer the case.
Recently, scientists have discovered that they are able to reverse the second law of thermodynamics — a law that plays an important role in our concept of the passage of time — through the use of a quantum supercomputer. Researchers at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, with the aid of both the United States of America and Switzerland, decided to see if it was possible for time to spontaneously reverse itself for a fraction of a second by examining an empty interstellar space with a single lonely electron located inside. As the electron sits there, the uncertainty of its position is expanding constantly and becoming more chaotic. However, the equation is reversible through complex conjunction — a phenomenon which does not appear in nature but which is theoretically possible. The possibility of this happening randomly is so incredibly small that it should be considered impossible.
The scientists at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology didn’t give up, though. They set out to see if they could reverse time in a four stage experiment that observed a quantum computer: order, degradation, time reversal, and regeneration. They found that in a two-qubit quantum computer, they were able to return it to its original state about 85% of the time. In other words, about 85% of the time, these scientists were able to reverse time.
https://phys.org/news/2019-03-physicists-reverse-quantum.html